The Easiest Way to Create PDFs in .NET

Hello, everybody, I'm Nick, and in this video I'll show you the easiest way to create PDFs in .NET using C# and QuestPDF.

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#csharp #dotnet

[thealbear]

The real time viewer is a gamechanger. that amount of time I spend rebuilding, checking only to find that the pdf is out by a few pixels. Amazing!

[shaihulud]

Nick, I get the impression you're reading my mind. Every month you come up at least with one topic that's currently on my learning list. Thank you so much, and keep up reading our minds :)

[steffenp]

Awesome to see you create a video on this. I've been using this for the last few months for a client. There are still some rough spots, but it has been amazing for creating Pdf's. If you're doing mostly simple things, this will be perfect for you. As you get to some of the complex stuff, specially if it requires measurements due to needing to wrap contests or show them in a non supported layout or ordering type, it can be a bit touch and go to get what you want.

Overall highly recommend this library.

[DamianLawrence-wf]

Nick, junior developer here - you along with Fireship are the 2 reasons I'm working as a developer today, you guys are clear, fast paced and great teachers! Keep it up man.

[szikig]

The biggest job for me is generating pdfs from templates. The goal is to generate as fast as possible. On the templates there are fields that have to have different values for each pdf file. The fastest I've achieved so far was the Aspose package, generating from MS WORD templates, for the simpler templates I could achieve 1000 pdf/sec.

[dukefleed]

my current approach is to use puppeteer sharp to convert an html page using chromium. the html page is generated by a blazor page / component, this way i can visit the page to see how it displays, also making it user accessible for preview. The downside of this is that puppeteer is very heavy and it is a little complicated (but possible) to write cross platform code due to the native part of the process. QuestPDF looks very interesting!

[chrismantonuk]

Me: Trying to convince my multi-million dollar a year client to pay $500/year for the commercial license

Client: Can’t we just build our own from scratch?

[derangedftw]

I actually used this library about a year ago to generate mini prints of QR codes and additional information in a two column design and then cut automatically after print. One of the most convenient PDF generation tools I've used and have sent support. The only issue I had with it was generating large PDFs in megabytes because a font set gets embedded with it. At the time I used it, the only fix was embedding a stripped down font set so you can generate PDFs that are kilobytes in size. Otherwise, an amazing library!

[vegeta]

This was amazing. I was actually using a non-standard size for creating PDFs for my last use case. It was much like a classic receipt where it is narrow and long. So the size was variable. And I ended up doing a manual process because I only needed to do it twice a week. I would literally just generate it in HTML and then using imaging software convert the HTML to a picture then a picture to PDF. Very inefficient, but I didn't want to spend money and I was in a hurry for the prototype. But this is so simple, I could have literally done this faster than figuring the manual process out. QuestPDF for the win.

[JoelThemmen]

We've been developing with Quest for a while. Really useful, great for a large number of use cases and a gentle learning curve. Highly recommend for small to mid-tier projects (and maybe beyond)

[AJIexa]

Great video! There’re also libraries which build PDF based on HTML page. This could be convenient for backend developers with basic frontend knowledge. With HTML template you can gain same preview experience with well-known CSS styling on board

[gurolgencel]

I used this library one of my project and it is really good library and working very stable.

[path_selector]

really cool seeing u support the packages you show to your audience

[CRBarchager]

I've been using SelectPDF for years now. It's not as simple as this but it can take an entire html page with css included and create a PDF from that. It's enough for what I'm doing right now but I might give this a try at a later time.

[SerafimMakris]

It would be nice in your next video to show how to sign this PDF, as it is something that is becoming a requirement in more and more businesses. Very good video. Keep it up.

[MrMatx]

to Generate Pdf's i've using the razorlight lib with wkhtmltoPdf lib, i get the cshtml razor, and trasform in string html to pass as content on wkthml pdf content prop and works well

[bdbgh]

This is a pretty impressive library, it took me just half a day to recreate a few documents at my work, way less painful than anything else I've used to generate report documents.

[KDOERAK]

The preview option is amazing, a productivity booster; it eliminates lots of tedious work.

[fatrickwilbur]

I remember when this library first came out. So happy to see it featured in a Nick Chapsas video

[arturaskravcenko]

I create a view, then fill it with it's model, then get it's html and pass it to puppeteer to return a pdf.